Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday March 08, 2013 @01:07PM
from the but-it-was-cold-yesterday dept.

ananyo writes "Global average temperatures are now higher than they have been for about 75% of the past 11,300 years, a study published in Science suggests. Researchers have reconstructed global climate trends all the way back to when the Northern Hemisphere was emerging from the most recent ice age. They looked at 73 overlapping temperature records including sediment cores drilled from lake bottoms and sea floors around the world, and ice cores collected in Antarctica and Greenland. For some records, the researchers inferred past temperatures from the ratio of magnesium and calcium ions in the shells of microscopic creatures that had died and dropped to the ocean floor; for others, they measured the lengths of long-chain organic molecules called alkenones that were trapped in the sediments. From the first decade of the twentieth century to now, global average temperatures rose from near their coldest point since the ice age to nearly their warmest, they report (abstract)."

We'll still have plastics but they'll be from a different source than old oil. Corn has been modified to produce plastic instead of starch. Plastics can be synthesized from other organic molecules and we can produce those by fermentation from agricultural waste. Heck, when the program to reduce the human population really gets going we'll have lots of organic material to synthesize plastics from. Well, what doesn't get run into the soylent green factories, anyway.

They didn't. It was cool to begin with, and slowly warming up. Also, by 10000 BP, there were no cavemen anymore. Also, when there *were* cavemen, they were not the only ones living here. See, there weren't enough caves for all the people.

The problem is that people are arguing about the wrong things. Instead of arguing about global warming we should be arguing about how to mitigate the effects. Crazy weather is a common byproduct of global warming and it has huge economic effects here and now. Think about the money the state of FL invests every year to keep their beaches from receding. Raise that water a few more inches and see how much harder it gets.

I have every faith that 300 years from now we'll still be around, how many people had to die to get us there is a huge looming question. If we continue to bury our heads in the sand about the issue then we'll ultimately cause more harm. Will good come of it afterwards? Absolutely, once things are destroyed we have a tendancy to build them back up and build them better. It's a heavy price to pay when we could invest in technology now instead of going to war and end up with workable solutions to move forward with. Instead we'll continue to fund the military industrial complex along with the healthcare debacle that everyone refuses to actually deal with as well.

By introducing great government controls (economy doesn't care why) you will slow down technological development. How stupid would ancestors of 100-300 years ago have been to put clamps on industrialization? Would we be better off with, maybe, year 1900-level tech today?

You mean like the hundreds and thousands of laws we put in place to control and limit the abuses of industrialization - from labor rights, to tarriff controls to bar dumping, to environmental controls to prevent pouring spent lubricants into our lakes and rivers, etc. I think it seems to have worked out pretty well when we've, say, stopped industry from hiring 8 year olds - even though it is absolutely provably true that their little hands ARE better at fitting into tight spaces between trapped gears to release them -- and other dangerous tasks in tight spaces.

I think it seems to have worked out pretty well when we've, say, stopped industry from hiring 8 year olds

Well, it's worth noting here that we in the developed world have created a few generations of rather incompetent workers as a result. I've run into people in their early twenties who have never held a job before. In such situations, an employer takes on a big risk by hiring such people.

Where do you get your information from? Child labor was extremely common and still is today in other countries without such strict labor laws.

For my grandfather it wasn't an option, he stopped going to school when both of his parents died during the flu pandemic of the late 20s. He dropped out after third grade and spent the rest of his years working. When he turned 18 the war was brewing, he signed up and then toiled in the same paper mill when he got back. He probably spent 50 years of his life working a

By the time child labor was outlawed, the industrial base had been built up to the point that child laborers weren't needed, and were vanishingly rare.

This is incorrect, and in an important way.

First off, the timeline: The first attempts to restrict child labor in the US were as early as 1837. By 1900, about half of the states in the US had banned child labor entirely. In 1916 and again in 1922, Congress passed child labor bans, but they were struck down by the Supreme Court. In 1938, most child labor was banned once and for all, and this time it passed constitutional muster due to FDR's appointments to the Supreme Court.

Yeah, what they probably are referring to is the timing of perihelion with respect to the seasons, or other parameters. Those do cause variations in the amount of solar energy arriving at the surface, and how it is distributed on the Earth. Look up Milankovitch cycles [wikipedia.org].

These studies only show what they do because most of the world's scientists are funded by the anti-oil lobby, who have so much money that the oil industry find it difficult to compete. Imagine if you were on an environmental archaeologist's research salary - that's got to be in the tens of thousands of dollars a year, why on earth would you accept the measly hundreds of thousands of dollars that the oil industry can afford to pay their researchers?

Because demand for oil will drop as we switch to non-fossil fuels like fission, fusion or (heaven forbid) wind/wave/tidal/solar? Because they have to keep the shareholders happy, which isn't necessarily correlated with any kind of foresight or long-term common sense? Because it's all about money, rather than preserving the environment which makes the concept of money possible? I don't know, I'm as mystified as you.

because obviously the man-made climate change crowd is stupid, and therefore they don't realize that hundreds of thousands of dollars per year are better than tens of thousands of dollars per year, and don't realize they could be doing better!

And if they they aren't smart enough for this simple math, how can we ever trust them with the more complex math required to analyze their data?

Well, but the oil lobby never lobbied to sell their oil, they do not need to. They actually lobby to get more oil/gas and to leave less oil/gas to the competition (e.g. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya wars etc.). Heck, more funds for green power companies means less competition in the oil extraction business, so the only guys who are screwed by this situation are those from the nuclear power lobby. Those cannot compete with the oil and green lobbies.

It didn't take a vast money machine to convince millions of young people to tattoo and pierce themselves in weird places. It doesn't take a vast money machine to convince everybody in academia that AGW is fact.

In both cases, all it takes is peer pressure.

Just because corporations prefer to use big money campaigns as their tool, doesn't mean it's the only tool required to instill a mass belief or activity.

Now, I'm not saying that AGW is or isn't real. The debate over the GW part is pretty much over. It's

There are probably literally a handfull of people who actually have opinions formed on science. They're sitting in universities looking at models run on supercomputers. Everybody else is using these people as priests, even if they didn't ask to be priests.

And for those of us who want to form our opinions based on science, but aren't climatologists, looking to the people who are and actually do study and understand climate science and asking them is wrong... how exactly?

For any other non-controversial field of science, this wouldn't be controversial either. Nobody says we're treating particle physicists like "priests" when we go with their best working picture of the microscopic universe with the understanding that this picture may change. How is that like

I'm not an AGW denier, but I can't tolerate the scare tactics. And I'm still pretty mad at East Anglia -- you just don't do science by gathering data, adjusting that data, and then throwing the original data out and not allowing (or even recording) the methods by which you adjusted that data. They could have just fucking made it all up, it's non-verifiable UNLESS someone else was keeping track of those weather stations that oh, no, all the records were kept at one place and then thrown out 20 years ago. Bad science. Heck, it could be accidentally bad science, but FUCKING OWN UP TO IT! Cannot stand people who talk their way around unsubstantiated data and try to pass it off as fucking immutable gospel.

Perhaps you should get your information somewhere other than denier blogs, your version of what happened at UEA is pure fantasy. They didn't collect any original data of their own, the data came from the organisations that ran the weather stations who have their own records. They deleted THEIR copy of the data not the originals which still exist. Their results have been confirmed by three separate organisations including one funded by deniers to disprove it.

First reaction: How are people still denying this???
Second reaction: We are so screwed

After spending a significant amount of time studying the data and politics surrounding this issue, I concluded that global warming is a baked cake at this point (no pun intended) The US contains a little over 4.5% of the worlds population says Google [google.com] yet we are responsible for the majority of world emissions. Now consider that we are trying to cut back, meanwhile China is rapidly industrializing, increasing its footpr

Other statistics say that contributions to the problem come from many places, including container ships that blast spend kerosene into the sky, unbridled. The oxymoron of "clean coal" and its dirtier real coal burning adds, too. The hole in the ozone layer has narrowed because we cared enough about halogen release that it's narrowed, at least as a by-product if not a direct result of active human conservation.

MPG gets better and lowered emissions as a byproduct, but the outlook is still abysmal. Buy inland

Now consider that we are trying to cut back, meanwhile China is rapidly industrializing, increasing its footprint with every passing day. When you think of the footprint China will have when it is as industrialized as the USA, any hope of avoiding serious global damage is tiny at this point.

With any luck they do not have a strong "green" movement that opposes nuclear.

When the hippies start saying that we must go nuclear to avoid global warming I will know that they at least believe in it themselves, until then they just look at it as a political argument.

The US is highest per capita, yes, but China holds the majority in total emissions. [wikipedia.org] And those are 2011 numbers, they've had a whole year to up the ante(note from 2010-2011, the US went down a little bit, China went up 17%). Think where the world will be when China surpasses us per capita.

I don’t think the US is the #1 greenhouse gas emitter. IRC
Canada and Australia are higher per person then the USA, having a lot of extractive industries.
China admits more than the US, having a higher population and a greater reliance on inefficient coal for energy.
India has the fastest growth.

When you think of the footprint China will have when it is as industrialized as the USA, any hope of avoiding serious global damage is tiny at this point.

If I were to be wildly optimistic, I'd suggest that there's a non-zero chance the leadership in China will realize that investing in renewables and/or nuclear energy is the smart way to go in the medium and especially long term, and that climate change will threaten their stability.

Realistically, I think if climate change threatens the US and China much, they'll simply inject iron into the ocean [wikipedia.org] without bothering to determine the long-term consequences of that action. Presumably their plan for dealing w

Thorium is overrated.There is no working reactor for thorium in existence. The tried designs (reactors that actually got build) had serious flaws and got shut down.On top of that thorium would solve only a few problems, you still have: risk of accidents, earth quakes, plane crashes, terror attacks.Bottom line a thorium based nuclear industry is in no way any safer than the current one.

Name brand products at WalMart are the same as elsewhere, and they usually cost less. They aren't going to fail sooner, WalMart doesn't process their goods through a hex machine so that they disintegrate rapidly.

From the first decade of the twentieth century to now, global average temperatures rose from near their coldest point since the ice age to nearly their warmest

We're preventing the temperature decline that would lead us into the next glaciation. And like another poster mentioned, we're still in an "ice age" but we're toward the end of one of the interglacial periods. If we heat things up enough maybe we can get out of the ice age altogether.;-)

Mars lost its atmosphere relatively quickly because it doesn't have a strong magnetic field to protect it from the solar wind. While earths atmosphere would expand somewhat as it warms, it would still be well within the protective confines of the earths magnetosphere. So, no, the earth will not lose its atmosphere with runaway global warming.

I think what people are worried about is a run-away global warming contingency. If that happens then it's only a matter of time before our atmosphere bleeds off and the Earth is left looking a lot like Mars.

Seriously? Who'se worried about that? And based on what evidence? It has also been found that increased CO2 cools the upper extremities of the atmosphere causing it to "shrink", which is quite the opposite of bleeding off into space.

Articles like this can be scaremongering with misleading titles for headline purposes. "Warmer than 75% of the last 11,000 years" means that is has been cooler than about 2700 of the last 11,000 years. This of course can turn around and bit you when your trying to do something for political gain instead of scientific gain. After all it's all too easy to point to something like this as proof that things aren't as bad as they have been in the past pre-industrial era.

I'm not taking sides on this issue, what I'm arguing is that people need to let science do the talking and leave politics on the wayside. The result of failing to do so is that otherwise perfectly sound science research gets tainted by politics. More science and less politics please, that is all.

you didn't mention at all that the article says it is warmer than 75% of the last 11,000 - marked since the last ice age. Well yeah, we're warmer than the last ice age. A large part of that chunk of time should be completely eliminated for, well, being ice-age. But maybe I'm just an oil-industry shill; after all, my house is solar powered, and I refuse to own a car...

And part of the science is that temperature measurements go back to the mid 19th century and actual direct measurement of global average temperature since the 1980s. With such a pausity of observation, one should be very careful about claiming that the science is "well understood". Or at least comfortable with being outrageously wrong.

Both sides like to cherry pick but I can tell you what 51 years of personal observations have taught me. I've never seen weather like we've been having in my entire life and I mean the last decade plus. The arctic is melting and the Native Americans there have an oral history going back thousands of years and they've never seen anything like the melt they are seeing. Remember the search for the northwest passage? We now call that summer in the arctic. Once in a 100 year storms seem to happen every three yea

Yeah when we discuss global warming I think it is a great idea to ignore the fact that the Earth was much warmer before the Ice Ages. Yeah we can all agree there was some event that helped put the earth into an Ice Age but why hasn't anyone ever asked if It was warmer here before the Ice Age wouldn't it be almost natural to expect the Earth to gradually return to what it was before the event before man was here to supposedly create a problem we refer to as "global warming". Almost like a spinning top a slig

Your ignorance of this subject is simply staggering. I beg you, as one sentient human being to another - research the various effects on the global climate (of which this cycle is just one), and see the correlation (or lack thereof) to global temperature. It's not as clear-cut as you seem to think it is. Hint: If you think you can debunk a well-established branch of science in a one-paragraph post to Slashdot, you're most likely wrong.

Convert all coal fire plants to LFTR Nuclear reactors. It will end up being as cheap as coal, even cheaper in the long run when you account for longevity of the converted plants which will increase the age from 25 years to 80 years. Stop worrying so much about feeling bad over whether its man mad or not, really who cares, the fact is as a species we should care about what makes our species have the most prosperous environment to live in. Forget for a moment about every other species on the planet. Let's be selfish, worry about us. Convert the plants to LFTR reactors get 1000 years of the most power dense, low waste solution while we have it available. Doesn't pollute large areas of land (one mountain pass has enough Thorium to last us 1000 years at 100% of US consumption for everything...every last Watt we use! Has less than.01 % waste that only lasts for 300 years and it consumes the long term waste at the same time. The power density of Thorium is a 1,000,000...thats 1 million times the power density of coal. It has none of the draw backs of other alternate energies and the nuclear reactors made with liquid salts can NOT melt down...That is no Fukushima, NO Chernobyl No Three Mile Island. IT is in no way possible with these reactors. It is a clean solution and doesn't pollute and like other alternative energies it works 24 hours a day. I have even worked out a method to pay for it, that only has a 1 year investment associated with it. COAL to LFTR [rawcell.com]

"As cheap as coal" - sorry, there are no "numbers" yet to indicate that since there are not even rough designs for a full scale LFTR thus no estimates of capital cost or running costs that can be trusted within an order of magnitude or two. That leaves hope and advertising.

Don't just make blatantly vague statements with no support of facts

I'd add to that advice blatantly specific statements than cannot be shown to be true.

Also take a look at what India is doing with thorium. It's a few decades more advan

Also, sadly, the reactor you are referring to in your article is neither LFTR or even a thorium reactor at all - the reactor nearing completion at Kalpakkam has a wikipedia page.:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_Fast_Breeder_Reactor

It's worth writing about on it's own merits instead of pretending it has anything at all to do with LFTR.

Well, that is wonderful news since about that long ago was the 'end' of the last ice age when temperatures were so low we were having massive die offs due to the cold climate.

Warming is good for life. You might not be acclimated to it but the reality is when we have periods of cooling we have die offs and when we have periods of warming there is an expansion of species, of biodiversity. The Earth has been much warmer in the past and that was good for life.

I welcome warmer temperatures. It has been too cold in the last thousands of years.

All this fussing about warming is ignoring the real problem. Global Warming is just a distraction from the real issue of toxic pollution.

Of course, since gradual warming over centuries or millennia in the past was good for life in the past it makes sense that rapid warming over decades would be just as good now (though humans will have to acclimate to some floods and famine).

As with all "global warming" topics, I can divide the opinions based on their mod points:[-1,1] = "global warming is a farce"[2,5] = "global warming is supported by a majority of scientists, debate over, hand over the keys to your SUV"

All this bullshit about blaming us for warming up the planet. Whether we have directly done this, or some natural occurring change has happened, its irrelevant.

Bottom line is, yes lets stop living as an excessive society. If we can make technology that don't pump pollutants or excessive CO2 into the atmosphere then lets do it. Don't do it to "Save the Planet" do it because it its just about being state-of-the art. Like, how about we stop

"Global average temperatures are now higher than they have been for about 75% of the past 11,300 years"

Good?

I thought we were all burning to a crisp in completely unprecedented temperatures in human history. 75th percentile doesn't frighten me. The assumption of 100th percentile at the end of the century hardly seems terrifying either.

1) Cherry-picked data alert: when someone picks a data set of "11300 years" it suggests Cherry-Picking. Why not 10k, 20k, 50k years? Does that not 'fit' the message?

2) from the article:"...After the ice age, they found, global average temperatures rose until they reached a plateau between 7550 and 3550 bc. Then a long-term cooling trend set in, reaching its lowest temperature extreme between ad 1450 and 1850...."So let's see, after an ice age it warmed, then it reached a "low temp extreme" and now it's hi

1) Why would an 11,300 year data set imply cherry picking? Because it is not a round enough number for you? Perhaps this temperature record is based on foraminifera. Perhaps those are obtained through gravity or piston coring. Perhaps in regions where you need a high enough sedimentation rate to resolve temperatures at 200-400 year intervals, you can only recover 11,300 years. I have only briefly read the article, but it is likely that before 11,300 years, they did not have the time resolution to accurately resolve the temperature prior to this point. This is a data resolution issue, not an "i'm hiding the truths from you" issue.

2) It is the rate of those changes that the authors are highlighting. Absolute temperatures aren't that telling (it has been both much colder and much warmer on earth at various times in history). If the current rate of temperature change had previously occurred in the past 11,300 years (i.e. was driven by natural sources) then they would have seen some indication of it. It would not have been as pronounced as the current trend, due to lower temporal resolution (which acts as a low pass filter), but it still would have appeared.

I don't think anyone is arguing that there are not climate cycles (see Milankovish, also, straw man). But you are comparing events that are happening on much different time scales. Prior to 100 years ago, the temperature had been falling for ~5000 years. In the past 100 years, the temperature has risen to what it was 5000 years ago. Clearly whatever cycle was occurring on a 10000 year period is not the same cycle that we are dealing with now.

I thought we were still technically in an "Ice Age" that started about 2.5 million years ago.

There are two different frequently encountered uses for "ice age" that conflict; the less-technical one of which is for what is more-technically known as a glacial period within what is, in the more technical use, known as an "ice age".

If someone says "most recent ice-age", they are reasonably unambiguously using the less-technical usage.

The "less technical" meaning is meaningless. Basically when the media or average person says "ice age" they mean glacial maximum, or more personally, ice sheets extending from the pole to... wherever they happen to live.

We will be out of the current ice age when Greenland and even Antarctica are ice-sheet free... Which is the normal (average) state of the planet. Cool glacial periods, like the one we're in now, are the exceptional periods vs. the rule Average global temperature, geologically speaking, i

ok, this stinks of troll, but I'll take it:"So calm the fuck down about religion, deniers, AGW, man made causes, SUVs, smug ass Californians, and Al Gore. Just realize accordingly, spend less money on ski equipment and more money on boats."

I dig your cool complacency, and actually I kind of agree. Global climate change probably won't make much of difference to your life during your lifetime, and maybe not even to your kids. Because you're rich. You can afford to pay 50% more for food (as agriculture is disrupted): the worst that will happen is you might move house, accept a slightly lower standard of living and bitch about the price of things. Oh, and 'buy more boats'.

It's the poor who will pay. I don't mean the middle class, I mean the 1 billion+ people who live on less than $1 a day. They will starve in greater numbers and die in greater numbers - they can't move, or "buy less ski equipment". I get that you don't care about that, but I hope that as a society we can bring ourselves to give a shit.

I don't think you understand how agriculture works. If you cut hydrocarbon input, production collapses, and poor people everywhere starve. Compared to the possibility of a few degree temperature increase, that is far better for everyone involved.

You are confusing localised weather and global climate. Your existence is dependent on the global climate - food prices, diseases, populations, infrastructure, foreign production, etc. etc. etc. all play a massive part in keeping you comfortable. It seems you don't understand the implications of global warming. It's not just that the sea will rise a bit and the summers will be nicer - it's far more serious than that. It is possible to do something about it - if you value your grandkids, that is. So be

The cited statistic is enough to mock this report. It's warmer now than it has been 74% of the time in the past 11,300 years. Seriously? WOuldn't that mean for 25% of the past 11,300 years the average temperature was HIGHER?! WHat makes the current temp so noteworthy? Because it is above the average, but below the highest temperature in the past 11,300 years?

Well, the article didn't note the alarming part of that so well. The issue isn't the temperature at the moment so much as the really alarming rate of change. Here's [climatedesk.org] a chart that documents the history and recent changes. Notice anything odd about the recent record relative to the entire temperature record going back to the dawn of agriculture?